Emergency meeting as double agent fights for life
Conspiracy theories circle as ex-double agent and his daughter fight for life after suspected poisoning
HOME SECRETARY Amber Rudd will chair a meeting of the Government’s emergency committee Cobra today to discuss the ongoing investigation into an incident in Salisbury in which a Russian double agent was left fighting for his life.
The meeting will be held in London after Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson vowed that Britain will mount a “robust” response if evidence of state responsibility emerges after former spy Sergei Skripal, 66, was found unconscious in Salisbury, Wiltshire, along with his 33-year-old daughter Yulia, following suspected exposure to an unknown toxic substance.
They were discovered shortly after 4pm on Sunday on a bench at a shopping centre in the town and they are now in a critical condition.
Addressing the Commons about the “disturbing incident”, Mr Johnson noted that this case had “echoes” of the death of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident who was fatally poisoned in London in 2006.
But as police mounted one of the most politically sensitive inquiries for years, the Russian Embassy said it was “completely untrue” to suggest the country’s special services were involved and criticised Mr Johnson for speaking “in such a manner as if the investigation was already over”.
Scotland Yard said the probe is being led by the counter-terrorism policing network because of its “specialist expertise” adding: “It has not been declared a terrorist incident and at this stage we are keeping an open mind as to what happened”
A military research facility at Porton Down, Wiltshire, is believed to be involved in examining what could have caused the pair to fall ill.
It was also revealed that a “small number” of emergency services personnel, including police, were assessed immediately after the incident, and all but one have been released from hospital.
Mr Skripal was convicted in 2006 of passing state secrets to MI6 before being given refuge in the UK as part of a spy swap. He was sent to Britain in 2010.
TIME CAUGHT up with Sergei Skripal opposite a branch of Timpson’s shoe repairs in the English West Country.
As the conspiracy theories circled above him yesterday, only one thing was certain. He had been knocked out by an unknown substance and was fighting for his life. So was his 33-year-old daughter, Yulia.
A woman passing by had spotted them, unconscious on a bench, and presumed they were homeless. She did not know that he was a Russian double agent.
Nearly 2,000 miles separates the Kremlin from Salisbury’s Maltings Centre – but revenge, as counter-espionage agents were quick to point out, knows no boundaries. And not even the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, Britain’s diplomat-in-chief, hesitated to point the finger at Vladimir Putin.
Had the president of the Russian Federation ordered a murder attempt beside the River Avon on a Sunday afternoon?
It would not have been the first time, said Yuri Felshtinsky, co-author of the book, Blowing Up Russia.
“Poisoning is their method of choice,” he said.
He was referring to the Federal Security Service – the FSB – which was, two years ago, judged by a London inquiry to have masterminded the assassination in 2006 of Mr Felshtinsky’s coauthor, Alexander Litvinenko, in an operation that was probably personally approved by Mr Putin.
He, too, had crossed the president, and he, too, was poisoned. A cup of tea laced with radioactive polonium-210 was what did for him.
“This has all the hallmarks of a Putin assassination,” Mr Felshtinsky said of the apparent attempt on Mr Skripal’s life.
“He is warning anyone in the FSB never to defect as they’ll be hunted down and killed.
“Sergei Skripal was a colonel in the FSB, like Alexander Litvinenko. The FSB always kills defectors as a loyalty warning to its agents.”
Mr Skripal’s route to Salisbury had been an unconventional one. A colonel in Russian military intelligence, he had been convicted in 2006 of passing state secrets to MI6, and sentenced to 13 years in prison. But four years later he was one of four agents pardoned and given refuge in Britain, in a deal said at the time to be the biggest exchange since the Cold War.
Last night, there were signs that the relationship between the two countries was headed back towards the freezer.
Mr Johnson acknowledged the “echoes” of the Litvinenko case, and said it was clear that Russia was now “in many respects a malign and disruptive force”.
Scotland Yard’s assistant commissioner Mark Rowley, the country’s most senior counterterrorism officer and just two weeks away from retirement, injected a note of intrigue.
“Russian exiles are not immortal,” he said. “They do all die and there can be a tendency for some conspiracy theories. But likewise we have to be alive to the fact of state threats as illustrated by the Litvinenko case.”
Richard Walton, one of his predecessors at the Yard, said: “If this is state-sponsored terrorism, and it looks entirely possible, then it will have grave consequences for UK-Russia bilateral relations that are already at breaking point.
“The UK cannot tolerate statesponsored terrorism.”